Relational agency is pivotal for understanding how language teachers seek and utilize relational resources in different contexts and grow to be agents of change amid various educational challenges. This study explored how three university teachers of Chinese as a second language enacted their relational agency to enhance their research capacity and sustain their professional development. Data on their personal network development was collected through concentric circle interviews, life-history interviews and written reflections over three months. Thematic (...) analysis was adopted for iterative coding and interpretation of the data. The findings revealed that teachers’ personal networks provided them with value guidance, emotional support and academic support, which exerted differential levels of impact on them to make agentic choices and actions. The study suggests that personal network analysis may serve as a suitable theoretical lens to achieve a multi-layered understanding of relational agency. The study also calls for more efforts to create learning opportunities and spaces in the relational context for teachers to build their career as agentic academics in language teacher education and development programs. (shrink)

Despite advances in theory, often driven by feminist ethicists, research ethics struggles in practice to adequately account for and respond to the agency and autonomy of people considered vulnerable in the research context. We argue that shifts within feminist research ethics scholarship to better characterise and respond to autonomy and agency can be bolstered by further grounding in discourses from the social sciences, in work that confirms the complex nature of human agency in contexts of structural and (...) other sources of vulnerability. We discuss some of the core concepts and critiques emerging from the literature on women and children's agency in under‐resourced settings, highlighting calls to move from individualistic to relational models of agency, and to recognise the ambiguous, value‐laden, and heterogeneous nature of the concept. We then draw out what these conceptual shifts might mean for research ethics obligations and guidance, illustrating our analysis using a case vignette based on research ethics work conducted in South Africa. We conclude that if research practices are to be supportive of agency, it will be crucial to scrutinise the moral judgements which underpin accounts of agency, derive more situated definitions of and responses to agency, and enable people and participants to influence these based on their own experiences and self‐perceptions. (shrink)

Timothy Brown's piece "Building Intricate Partnerships with Neurotechnology" makes a valuable contribution to ethical discussion of questions about human identity and agency raised by Deep Brain Stimulation. The paper brings together a number of relational approaches to narrative identity and autonomy, drawing on first-personal empirical accounts, to extend a relational account of agency to include neurostimulators. In doing so, it builds on the contributions relational approaches have made to making sense of changes to aspects of (...) selfhood following neurological intervention while also helpfully reframing concerns away from the threat that DBS may pose to aspects of self-hood. This approach directs... (shrink)

In this article, we explore how deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices designed to “close the loop”—to automatically adjust stimulation levels based on computational algorithms—may risk taking the individual agent “out of the loop” of control in areas where (at least apparent) conscious control is a hallmark of our agency. This is of particular concern in the area of psychiatric disorders, where closed-loop DBS is attracting increasing attention as a therapy. Using a relational model of identity and agency, (...) we consider whether DBS designed for psychiatric regulation may require special attention to agency. To do this, we draw on philosophical work on relational identity and agency, connecting it with reports from people using first-generation DBS devices for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We suggest a way to extend a notion of relational agency to encompass neural devices. (shrink)

The book charts a new direction for environmental ethics—and ethics in general—by relationally revising the concept of moral agency in light of the current understanding of embodied mental processes and environmentally extended cognition. The book sketches the crucial implications of a relational theory of ethics for environmental ethics.

Peer commentary on: Goering, S., Klein, E., Dougherty, D. D., & Widge, A. S. (2017). Staying in the loop: Relational agency and identity in next-generation DBS for psychiatry. AJOB Neuroscience, 8(2), 59-70.

This article explores how the concept of agency in social theory changes when it is conceptualized as a relational rather than an individual phenomenon. It begins with a critique of the structure/agency debate, particularly of how this emerges in the critical realist approach to agency typified by Margaret Archer. It is argued that this approach, and the critical realist version of relational sociology that has grown from it, reify social relations as a third entity to (...) which agents have a cognitive, reflexive relation, playing down the importance of interaction. This upholds the Western moral and political view of agents as autonomous, independent, and reflexive individuals. Instead, the article considers agency from a different theoretical tradition in relational sociology in which agents are always located in manifold social relations. From this, an understanding is created of agents as interactants, ones who are interdependent, vulnerable, intermittently reflexive, possessors of capacities that can only be practised in joint actions, and capable of sensitive responses to others and to the situations of interaction. Instead of agency resting on the reflexive monitoring of action or the reflexive deliberation on structurally defined choices, agency emerges from our emotional relatedness to others as social relations unfold across time and space. (shrink)

Timothy Brown invites us to think about the ways in which people who are being treated with deep brain stimulation might come to interact with their devices. He suggests that a framework of relational agency can help us to understand both the benefits and the challenges of DBS because DBS systems are, while not full fellow agents, more than mere props; users must sometimes "negotiate and collaborate with their stimulators". We agree that it is important to develop conceptual (...) frameworks that both do justice to the ways that individuals respond to using DBS and give them new ways to think about the device, their relationship to it, and its role in their lives. In this commentary, we consider three... (shrink)

Novel neurotechnologies, like deep brain stimulation and brain‐computer interface, offer great hope for treating, curing, and preventing disease, but raise important questions about effects these devices may have on human identity, authenticity, and autonomy. After briefly assessing recent narrative work in these areas, we show that agency is a phenomenon key to all three goods and highlight the ways in which neural devices can help to draw attention to the relational nature of our agency. Drawing on insights (...) from disability theory, we argue that neural devices provide a kind of agential assistance, similar to that provided by caregivers, family, and others. As such, users and devices participate in a kind of co‐agency. We conclude by suggesting the need for developing relational agency‐competencies—skills for reflecting on the influence of devices on agency, for adapting to novel circumstances ushered in by devices, and for incorporating the feedback of loved ones and others about device effects on agency. (shrink)

Agency is talked about by many as something that people living with dementia lose, once they've lost much else—autonomy, identity, and privacy, among other things. While the language of loss may capture some of what transpires in dementia, it can obscure how people living with dementia and their loved ones share agency through sharing capacities for memory, language, and decision‐making. We suggest that one consequence of adopting a framework of loss is that it makes the default response to (...) changes in agency the substitution of a family member's agency for the purported lost agency of someone living with dementia. We argue for an alternative framework in which sharing agency is recognized as a central feature of living with dementia. Building on the work of relational theorists, we argue for the value of thinking about agency in dementia as fundamentally shared, and explore potential implications for treatment, caregiver support, and building dementia‐friendly environments. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation is an FDA-approved treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, dystonia, and epilepsy—with experimental use for mood disorders. DBS systems consist of a signal generator, typically implanted in the user's chest, that sends impulses to electrodes implanted in select areas of the user's brain. These signals change the activity of areas of the brain associated with unwanted symptoms. Several research groups have begun trials to use DBS as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. DBS, however, comes (...) with a... (shrink)

This study examines philosophically the idea of relationality as a feature of moral agency and analyses the implications of adopting such an idea in ethical theories as frameworks for environmental ethics. The purpose is to fill the gap in academic philosophical discussion concerning the relationality of the operations of moral agency. In environmental philosophy, relationality is a quite widely defended idea with regard to the concepts of nature and human nature. However, as far as I know, relationality as (...) constitutive for moral operations has not been previously scrutinised to any large extent. The main task consists of two parts. The first is to construct the idea of moral agency as ecologically relational on the basis of the parallel with the lines of thought taken in two critical stances in environmental ethics towards the mainstream modern conception of moral agency, namely evolutionary naturalism and ecofeminist constructivism. The second is to analyse the philosophical implications of this relational shift in moral naturalism and moral constructivism. Together they clarify the implications of relational moral agency for environmental ethics. The study starts by analysing the concepts of moral agency in the three distinguished strategies of environmental ethics: the modernist one, which is used as the reference line, evolutionary naturalism and ecofeminist constructivism. Both of the latter take a critical stance towards the first, but from philosophically opposing directions. This study shows that these two criticisms parallel each other and are directed towards a converging idea of ecologically relational agency. The concept of relational agency is sketched through interdisciplinary support from the natural sciences, psychological and philosophical anthropology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and action. It is argued that a currently plausible notion of moral agency challenges the view widely presupposed by modern moral philosophy. According to the analysed sources, human mental processes, knowledge and value formation included, are extended to their environments, relationships providing knowledge, experience or even intention are mutually interactive, and even intentional activity can be a non-individual issue. Research on these features refer to environmental relationality of mental operations. Relational agency fulfils the environmentalist’s quest for a plausible notion of agency. However, to consider moral identity, as well as knowing, reasoning and acting as ecologically relational challenges common conceptions of moral autonomy and rationality. Question is raised whether this compromises the autonomy and authority of ethics. The philosophical implications of ecologically relational notion of agency are analysed in contexts of Humean naturalism, neo-Aristotelian naturalism (especially Martha Nussbaum) and neo-Kantian constructivism (especially Christine Korsgaard). Korsgaard’s theory is proposed to offer a mediating tool to reconcile relational explanation with normative authority. It is argued that the relational approach to ethics can survive the quests for moral realism, although it challenges the usual restrictions of metaethical categories and points towards a modest, relationally realist ethics. (shrink)

There has been a marked increase in the active involvement of children and young people in social research. This move is underpinned by rights based arguments that children and young people should have a voice, and that this voice should be listened to. However, concerns have been raised about the appropriateness of children’s and young people’s rights and participation in research. This is primarily due to queries over whether they have enough capacity to enact the individual agency required to (...) be rights holders and participate in research. In addition, a focus on their inherent vulnerability continues to be a key feature of research ethics protocols. In this paper I argue that both capacity and vulnerability should be seen as socially produced, meaning that the scope for capacity to be increased and vulnerability decreased also lies within the social. I draw from notions of relational autonomy or ‘associational presence’ to argue that what children and young people need to be active participants in research is the creation of spaces within which relational agency can be nurtured and sustained. Such techniques and values are found in participatory research approaches and can be used to create such emancipatory environments. (shrink)

This collection of original essays explores the social and relational dimensions of individual autonomy. Rejecting the feminist charge that autonomy is inherently masculinist, the contributors draw on feminist critiques of autonomy to challenge and enrich contemporary philosophical debates about agency, identity, and moral responsibility. The essays analyze the complex ways in which oppression can impair an agent's capacity for autonomy, and investigate connections, neglected by standard accounts, between autonomy and other aspects of the agent, including self-conception, self-worth, memory, (...) and the imagination. (shrink)

This paper argues that Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice requires a politics that is attentive to the agency of the other. Rethinking representation as a relational, rather than a sovereign, concept captures the relationship between agency and justice that is emerging in global politics today. It is increasingly common that non-governmental actors engage with communities through practices of trust and responsibility without appeal to political authority. Relational representation helps clarify the dynamics of these relationships and (...) provides a way to think about their purpose. That purpose is to effect changes that ameliorate suffering and injustice, working to re-present the represented persons as more capable persons, more free to use their agency. (shrink)

Living related organ transplantation is morally problematic for two reasons. First, it requires surgeons to perform nontherapeutic, even dangerous procedures on healthy donors—and in the case of children, without their consent. Second, the transplant donor and recipient are often intimately related to each other, as parent and child, or as siblings. These relationships challenge our conventional models of medical decisionmaking. Is there anything morally problematic about a parent allowing the interests of one child to be risked for the sake of (...) another? What exactly are the interests of the prospective child donor whose sibling will die without an organ? Is the choice of a parent to take risks for the sake of her child truly free, or is the specter of coercion necessarily raised? (shrink)

In this essay, I use the theological anthropology of the apostle Paul as a diagnostic lens in order to bring into focus some implicit assumptions about human personhood in the goals and methods of treatment with psychotropic medications. I argue that Paul views the body as a mode of participation in larger relational matrices in both vulnerable and vital ways. He thus sees the self as constituted relationally rather than as fundamentally isolated and self-determining. Such an understanding of personhood (...) yields an account of human agency as co-constituted and freedom as interpersonally mediated and sustained. From this perspective, the proper goal for psychiatric medication is the removal of barriers to life-giving human connections; methods of care for persons in psychological distress may include medication, but they also require embodied personal encounter. (shrink)

The human relation to things in the world is at stake in the so-called post-humanist era where the distinction between human and non-human is blurred, as indicated in a term like ‘the nano-self’. How should we understand the nature of our relation to things in this era? Or how can we describe an educationally meaningful relation we as human agents can make in relation to things, artificial and natural, in the face of this technologically hybrid and ever-dehumanizing tendency of society? (...) Well-known for his actor-network theory, Bruno Latour, an influential materialist and philosopher of technology, says that ‘objects’ have agency as much as humans; so we need to be able to translate the language of things into the language of men or vice versa as a way of co-shaping the world we live in. What does this mean and how can we do so? In carefully examining his theory, the essay attempts to explore and reformulate his account of the mediating role of human agency to see if it can provide us with an educationally plausible post-humanist concept of human agency, which can lead us into an ecologically ethical and politically responsible approach to education in general, and science education in particular. (shrink)

The discussion of collective agency involves the reduction problem of the concept of a collective. Individualism and Cartesian internalism have long restricted orthodox theories and made them face the tension between an irreducible concept of a collective and ontological reductionism. Heterodox theories as functionalism and interpretationism reinterpret the concept of agency and accept it as realized on the level of a collective. In order to adequately explain social phenomena that have relations as their essence, in this paper we (...) propose a relational, holistic account of collective agency and argue that functionalism and interpretationism can be integrated into such an account. (shrink)

This essay is an investigation into the social construction of agents and agency, linked directly to a cross-cultural predilection toward accumulation, categorization and data distribution in the interest, whether latent or manifest, of community formation. It is presented as a mediation on mediation, emerging out of ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration1 oriented around creative design of multiple interfaces into distributed information spaces, accessed through utilization of an agent technology called the “Information personae.” As such it is tenuously positioned at the nexus (...) of art, computer science, engineering and cultural studies, sitting comfortably at home in none. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model (...) offered by Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized world. The principal aim of the (...) article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures. (shrink)

Political theory and philosophy need to widen their view of the space in which what matters politically takes place, and I suggest that integrating the conditions of sustainability of all affected—that is, all participants in nature's relations—is a necessary first step in this direction. New materialists and posthumanists have challenged how nature and politics have traditionally been construed. While acknowledging the significance of their contributions, I critically examine the ethical and political implications of their ontological project. I focus particularly on (...) how the decentering of human agency that they advocate for raises a set of concerns that need to be addressed in developing an appropriate ecological ethics. I argue that the latter must be attuned to the vulnerability of living beings who participate in relationships that sustain life on earth. This brings me to conclude that qualitative distinctions between the worlds ofbiosandtechneare necessary. This is because we need to think critically about ways of evaluating types of relationships so that we can assess them and establish which are worth nurturing and protecting and which are not. (shrink)

This article presents a relational criticism of the "morphogenetic theory" of M. Archer. This theory is founded and representative of the most influential mode of perception of the social universe of the last few decades: co-determinism (structure ↔ agency). Co-determinism's influence can be explained by its integration of modern general presuppositions like freedom, individualism, and the quest for a new social order. By identifying five basic principles of relational sociology, we see that Archer's co-deterministic theory offers a (...) complicated solution to avoid voluntarism and co-determinism, limits the potential of sociological imagination, cannot adequately see the fluidity of social processes, produces a certain reification of social structures and agency, and is based on an inconsistent use of egocentric and relational perspectives. These problems can be avoided if we use a relational approach (actor ↔ actor ⇒ structures) based on the study of complex and empirical trans-actions. (shrink)

Forms of collective leadership, such as Distributed Leadership, have become increasingly important. The need for measurement of the variables involved in the delegation processes, represents a new challenge for organizations that want to ensure high-level working. The present research aimed to validate the Italian version of the Distributed Leadership Agency (DLA) and verify its applicability in different contexts. The study involved all the employees of an Italian public Hospital, which were selected to complete a survey on organizational perceptions. The (...) sample comprised 704 employees (doctors, nurses, clerks, staff workers, healthcare assistants, consultants, management). Multiple Confirmatory Factor Analyses (Maximum Likelihood) have been computed to explore the factorial structure of the DLA, along with associations with other work outcomes. Results clarified that the Italian DLA respects the tri-factorial structure of the construct, suggested by Yukl (2002), with good fit indexes and reliability; moreover, in line with the literature, DLA was strongly related to satisfaction, commitment, and trust. Results contribute to underline the robustness of the construct of distributed leadership agency in different cultural sectors, and provide a useful tool to be adopted in the Italian context. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of the quantification of higher education by introducing a theoretical framework for power relations and agency within this process. Instead of treating evaluation regimes as external and imposed on the sector, it argues for a relational approach to the problem of exercising power over the higher education sector through means of evaluation. To develop such an approach, the article draws on two sources: Guy Neave’s account of the evaluative state and Bob Jessop’s strategic– (...) class='Hi'>relational approach (SRA) to the state. By using the latter to further develop our understanding of the logic under which the evaluative state operates, the article offers a general framework for inquiring about the conditions that shape power relations and impact the degree of agency at the disposal of the actors involved in the evaluative state. For this purpose, the article operationalises the six general dimensions of the state developed on the grounds of the SRA in the context of the evaluative state. In turn, to demonstrate its heuristic value, the article refers to the emergence of the evaluative state in Poland and how scholarly communication was quantified and made commensurate in this process. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and Sympoiesis” by Mads Julian Dengsø & Michael David Kirchhoff. Abstract: I examine the authors’ concept of relational cognition, showing that it has two possible readings, both more “cartesian” than the authors suppose. Whence the authors’ “anti-cartesianism,” then? I suggest it is due to an understanding of cognition that allows cognition to operate at very long timescales, and provide an argument to resist such an understanding.

Interest in credit ratings agencies and their role in financial markets is at an all-time high. Concerns about a lack of transparency concerning process, conflicts of interest, and limited competition are frequently discussed by politicians, regulators and other commentators. These issues we term the credit ratings agency trinity of solicitude. We shed some light on this trinity by considering the unique relationship that exists between corporate borrowers and the CRAs they engage to rate their securities. The exchange relationships literature (...) is used to create a model where commitment plays a central role. Technical qualities, relationship qualities and dependence are theorised as antecedents of commitment, which is described by two constructs of affective commitment and calculative commitment. The issuer’s intention to remain with the CRA, their loyalty, is the consequence of commitment. The model is operationalized by means of a survey questionnaire administered to issuers of corporate debt in the United Kingdom. As expected, perceptions of the quality of the relationship and affective commitment play an important role in CRA-issuer relations. However, contrary to expectations, the technical quality of the rating and issuer dependence on the CRA play little role in determining commitment and continuance. The implications of these findings are discussed along with areas for future research. (shrink)

The article is aimed at showing how the perception of personal agency is interlinked with the attitudes towards keeping up or breaking the public norms among different age groups in Lithuania. The article proposes the general thesis that this link may be determined by the different experience and socialisation of generations. The article employs the quantitative representative data (collected in 2020) from the survey of the Lithuanian population aged 18–52, which is analysed using bivariate and multivariate methods by comparing (...) two distinctive generations. The data analysis reveals the pattern – the middle-aged cohort has a weaker sense of agency and is more likely to justify breaking of certain public norms than younger adults. Additionally, the age cohort factor or generational categories are an important factor in explaining how the disapproval of breaking of certain public norms is correlated with higher levels of personal agency. The latter finding supports the conceptual thesis that socialisation in the Soviet system may be an important factor in determining differences in personal agency and the attitudes of public norm breaking in Lithuania. (shrink)

There is a complexity of entities and happenings embodied within the pillars that frame the doorways in our homes and support the broad flat spaces that form supermarkets and department stores. Each pillar speaks to the mythology encircling the origins of Gothic architecture; the ideas surrounding the shift from the trunks and boughs of the sacred grove toward the columns, arches, and vaults of church and cathedral. Each pillar embodies the evolution of life and the history of the Earth. Awakening (...) toward the relational agency at play within the “humanly derived” allows us to recognize this agency as akin to wildness and as William Cronon asserts, this kinship draws us closer to recognizing and responding to the wild in all that surrounds us. It also produces a shift in how we understand the concept of wilderness. It is not, as Cronon contends, a cultural construct, but a fluxing and complex gestalt that includes both human and more-than-human agency. (shrink)

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, (...) ultimately depends on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender-specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self-government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy (...) advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women's Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self-government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women's Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity. (shrink)

The sense of agency is a basic feature of our subjective experience. Experimental studies usually focus on either its attributional aspects or on its motoric aspects. Here, we combine both aspects and focus on the subjective experience of the time between action and effect. Previous studies [Haggard, P., Aschersleben, G., Gehrke, J., & Prinz, W.. Action, binding and awareness. In W. Prinz, & B. Hommel, Common mechanisms in perception and action: Attention and performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press] have shown (...) a temporal attraction in the perceived times of actions and effects, but did directly not study the relation between them. In three experiments, time estimates of an interval between an action and its subsequent sensory effect were obtained. The actions were either voluntary key press actions performed by the participant or kinematically identical movements applied passively to the finger. The effects were either auditory or visual events or a passive movement induced to another finger. The results first indicated a shortening of the interval between one’s own voluntary action and a subsequent effect, relative to passive movement conditions. Second, intervals initiated by observed movements, either of another person or of an inanimate object, were always perceived like those involving passive movements of one’s own body, and never like those involving active movements. Third, this binding effect was comparable for auditory, somatic and visual effects of action. Our results provide the first direct evidence that agency involves a generalisable relation between actions and their consequences, and is triggered by efferent motor commands. (shrink)

The world we live in is unjust. Preventable deprivation and suffering shape the lives of many people, while others enjoy advantages and privileges aplenty. Cosmopolitan responsibility addresses the moral responsibilities of privileged individuals to take action in the face of global structural injustice. Individuals are called upon to complement institutional efforts to respond to global challenges, such as climate change, unfair global trade, or world poverty. Committed to an ideal of relational equality among all human beings, the book discusses (...) the impact of individual action, the challenge of special obligations, and the possibility of moral overdemandingness in order to lay the ground for an action-guiding ethos of cosmopolitan responsibility. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to any reflective reader concerned about justice and responsibilities in a globalised world. Jan-Christoph Heilinger is a moral and political philosopher. He teaches at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, and at Ecole normale supérieure, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (shrink)

Beginning with a critique of the Enlightenment human/nature dualism, this essay argues for a new conception of human agency based on culturopoeia and an application of an ecofeminist dialogic method for analysing human-nature relationships, with the idea of volitional interdependence replacing ideas of free will and determinism. Further, it posits that we need to replace the alienational model of otherness based on a psychoanalytic model with a relational model of anotherness based on an ecological model, and concludes by (...) encouraging attention to developing bioregional natured cultures in place of nation states and multinational corporations. (shrink)

New techniques for modifying the genomes of agricultural organisms create difficult ethical challenges. We provide a novel framework to replace worn-out ethical lenses relying on ‘naturalness’ and ‘crossing species lines.’ Thinking of agricultural intervention as a ‘negotiation’ of ‘integrity’ and ‘agency’ provides a flexible framework for considering techniques such as genome editing with CRISPR/Cas systems. We lay out the framework by highlighting some existing uses of integrity in environmental ethics. We also provide an example of our lens at work (...) by looking at the creation of ‘cisgenic’ potatoes to resist late potato blight. We conclude by highlighting three distinct advantages offered by the integrity framework. These include a more fitting way to look at the practice of scientific researchers, a more inclusive way to consider ethics around agriculture, and a more flexible way to provide the ethical grounds for regulation in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

Explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. Cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts"--Provided by publisher.

Little research has explored the possible effects of government institutions in emerging economies on ethical reviews of multinational research. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth telephone interviews with 15 researchers, Research Ethics Committees personnel, and a government agency member involved in multinational HIV Prevention Trials Network research in emerging economies. Ministries of Health or other government agencies often play pivotal roles as facilitators or barriers in the research ethics approval process. Government agency RECs reviewing protocols may face particular challenges, as (...) they can lack resources, be poorly organized, have inconsistent review processes and limited expertise, and use differing definitions of national interests, including upholding national reputation and avoiding potential exploitation and stigma of the country's population. The MOH/governmental review body may be affected by power dynamics and politics in study reviews; may consider issues both related and unrelated to research ethics as understood elsewhere; and may prioritize particular diseases, treatments, or interventions over other topics/types of research. Poor communication and deeply-rooted tensions may exist between sponsor and host countries, impeding optimal interactions and reviews. Investigators must understand and plan for the potential effects of governmental agencies on multinational collaborative research, including preserving adequate time for agency review, and contacting these agencies beforehand to address issues that may arise. Better understanding of these issues can aid and advance appropriate global scientific collaboration. (shrink)

Recent research into climate shocks and what this means for the on-farm production of food revealed mixed and unanticipated results. Whilst the research was triggered by a series of catastrophic, climate related disruptions, Australian beef producers interviewed for the study downplayed the immediate and direct impacts of climate shocks. When considering the changing nature of production under shifting climatic conditions, producers offered a commentary on the digital technology and data which interconnected with climate solutions deriving from both on and off (...) the farm. Perceptions of digital technologies were mixed. Some viewpoints outlined how data driven climate solutions supported on farm planning and decision making, helping to manage climate risks and shocks. However, alongside these narratives, concerns were raised about satellite-based sustainability surveillance and their implications for producer agency. These concerns include the data-informed actions of non-farming third parties, such as bank loan call-ins for properties perceived to be a climate risk, remote surveillance of ground cover, and the commercial re-appraisal of pastoral lands as carbon sinks. Digital solutions to climate shocks thus emerge as inherently ambivalent, a response to shocks and a potential catalyst for renewed crisis. Drawing upon the theoretical lens of relationality, we argue that digital data are increasingly entangled with other material and non-material elements that may disrupt and/or reconfigure the management of farming and with that, the future security of food production. In some instances, data-based solutions to climate risks and shocks present even greater risks to producer agency than climate risks and shocks themselves. (shrink)

This article reviews the common models of pious women's agency in the literature with respect to pious feminist perceptions in Turkey, and calls for a relational approach to subjectivity and autonomy. After critically assessing individualistic models of pious women's autonomy as well as the main theoretical tenets of Saba Mahmood's landmark study on the women's piety movement in Egypt, I argue that previous models cannot fully explain the second stage of pious subjectivity-formation in the pious feminist narratives in (...) Turkey, which combines habituation with informed choice. In the intersection of applied theory and ethnographic empirical research, my study posits the need for a relational reformulation of these common models that can account for self-constitutive engagement with multiple discursive traditions, and the importance of complex and interrelated webs of relationships. I suggest that Jennifer Nedelsky's relational self and relational autonomy and Kenneth Gergen's relational multi-being might provide a starting point for such an approach. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, the debate between supporters of internal and external relations showed how our assumptions on the nature of relations result in ontological, epistemic, and ethical commitments. In this debate, Alfred North Whitehead provided the most articulated and satisfying account through his “philosophy of the organism,” which holds relations to be internal yet vectorial, without excluding completely external relations. Today, the debate has become once again topical and constitutes a core issue for speculative realism. This (...) paper aims to show how the theory of external relations endorsed by some leading figures of speculative realism does not suffice to preserve the desiderata it was designed for, and how a more serious consideration of Whitehead’s theory would have beneficial effects on the ontological and ethical issues of this rejuvenated metaphysical discourse. (shrink)